


Benefit

by ariadnes_string



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Gen, Masks, Pining, Post-Book(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 13:59:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3813151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How can it be, that you, who’ve worn so many faces, should remain always the same, while I, who’ve had the same face for a thousand years, have changed so much that I am unrecognizable to myself?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Benefit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Teaotter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teaotter/gifts).



> Takes place after _Ancillary Sword_ ; spoilers for that book.

After she’d been rescued from the suspension pod, Seivarden had begun to have a recurring nightmare. In the dream, she would be looking into a mirror. Prompted by some obscure impulse, she’d tug at the edge of her face, at the jut of her jawbone. And the skin would come away in her hand, peeling back like a mask. Underneath it would be nothing but the dark void of space. A few stars twinkling in the blackness, but mostly unfathomable emptiness where her blood, and bone, and brains should have been.

She’d wake up screaming.

There were many reasons why she’d turned to kef, but the dream had been chief among them.

After Breq had forcibly broken her addiction during those long weeks on Nilt, Seivarden had dreaded the dream’s return. But although she’d sometimes finger the corner of her jaw, convinced that something terrible and unknown lay beneath her face, something held the dream at bay.

+

“Captain Seivarden, stay behind please,” the Fleet Captain said.

Casting surreptitious glances her way, Ekalu and Tisarwat ushered their visitors from the planet out of the Fleet Captain’s quarters. Breq had hosted another in a series formal dinners for the administrators and plantation owners—the best dinnerware, fresh foods from the planet cooked in exotic ways. These were dinners designed to show the splendor and power of the Radch, a concrete display of _Mercy of Kalr_ ’s control over the region. Breq was still trying to get to the bottom of slave traffic out of Anoek, Seivarden knew, and each of these dinners featured a certain amount of questioning along those lines.

Their visitors this time had been a plantation owner named Owaainil, her daughters and her daughters’ partners. Owaainil was a powerfully built person, well-convinced of her own worth, and likely to raise a supercilious eyebrow at comments she found overly sympathetic to Anoekian laborers. She was the sort of person Seivarden would have found attractive a thousand years ago. Remarkably, she seemed to know Seivarden’s story, and had quizzed her on it with a directness bordering on rudeness. Despite herself, Seivarden had found herself drawn into conversation.

Now, Seivarden watched the visitors go, and felt herself teetering between anticipation and anxiety. The Fleet Captain probably had business to discuss with her, and her pride in being the one Breq turned to on such matters, her pleasure at being useful, after being useless for so long, was strong. Yet it was always shadowed by the fear that she had done something wrong. In Breq’s company, she had become aware of her own lack of awareness, if such a paradox were possible. After a lifetime of not caring what others thought, she’d come to wish she understood them better. Now, she wondered whether she’d said too much to Owaainil? Or not enough? 

But Breq offered neither confidences nor reproofs after the others had left. She said nothing, merely turned her gaze inward, in a way that suggested she was going over information sent by Ship. Several of her Kalrs tidied the mess left by the dinner. Seivarden, left to her own devices, clasped her hands behind her back to keep from crossing her arms or fingering her jaw. She didn’t know where to look. Not at Breq’s hands, sturdy and compact in their crisp white gloves, tapping out messages to Ship and Station. Certainly not at her face, so familiar and yet still strange, after all their adventures together. She studied the floor instead, and found it as unremarkable as any floor in any ship.

“Thank you. I won’t be needing anything more this evening,” Breq told her Kalrs when the dishes and table linens had been cleared away.

The Kalrs’ faces remained impassive, only the tiniest movement of their eyes betraying their surprise at being asked to leave Seivarden alone with the Fleet Captain at this hour. They nodded in tandem and left.

And now something different flared in Seivarden’s belly, something traitorous and unruly. Could Breq have changed her mind? Was she about to make the persistent rumors that Seivarden was kneeling to her into fact? 

But, again, nothing happened except that Breq seemed to relax infinitesimally. Her face did not change. Only their long months together allowed Seivarden to see the subtle drop in her shoulders.

“Do you remember that game they had on Nilt?” Breq asked.

Seivarden did. It had been a crude, uncivilized thing, lacking any nuance or excitement. She’d been terrible at it. “Tiktik?”

“That’s it. I wish we had a board. It passed the time.”

Seivarden had hated that game. Even thinking of it made her remember Breq lying in that Nilter hospital, more dead than alive after jumping off the bridge. After jumping off that bridge for her. She felt herself flushing with shame, and with desire.

If Breq noticed, she didn’t say anything. She had abstracted herself again, into her own thoughts or the Ship’s business. “Why am I here?” Seivarden wanted to shout at her, wanted to plead. But she kept her peace, though whether she did so out of the long habit of military obedience, or because she’d learned that the Fleet Captain’s actions encompassed subtleties and consequences she could never understand, she did not know. 

And so they passed the time together silently. It was no different, really, than any of the silent evenings they had spent together in miserable shelters on Nilt, or on the long journey to Omaugh Station, or in their quarters there. Perhaps she just wants company, Seivarden thought, although she had never known Breq to mind being alone.

After what seemed a long time, though her internal clock told her only thirty minutes had passed, Breq said, “Thank you, Captain. I’ve kept you long enough.” 

And Seivarden found herself out in the corridor, fighting through a welter of emotions.

+

A month or so later, it happened again.

This time, the plantation owner’s name was Kak, a taciturn individual who barely spoke unless directly addressed. Seivarden found herself grateful for Tisarwat’s careless knack for conversation, though usually it annoyed her. She also found herself glancing at Breq more often than she should have.

Nothing had changed between them after Owaainil’s visit. Ekalu had asked Seivarden about it, of course—the whole ship knew that the Fleet Captain had kept Seivarden with her after sending out the Kalrs. 

“Nothing happened,” Seivarden had told her, because, after much thinking, she couldn’t see that anything had. Though it was always possible something had happened that she was too obtuse to notice. The idea was irksome.

Ekalu had not believed her. After the second time, Ekalu did not even ask.

Which was a good thing, because there was nothing to tell, except that Breq had actually procured or manufactured a Tiktik board somewhere, and forced Seivarden to play with her. She had, sullenly, and lost every round.

+

When it happened a third time, Seivarden felt herself losing her temper. The dinner had been for a noisy collection of industrialists, this time, too many and too similar looking for Seivarden to keep their names straight. Although her confusion might also have been due to her preoccupation with what would happen after the dinner.

As the plates passed, and Tisarwat made small talk, and Breq asked her pointed questions, Seivarden tried to sort it out. Every time she thought it through, she came to the same unappealing conclusion. The Fleet Captain seemed to want people on the planet—powerful people on the planet—to believe that Seivarden was kneeling to her. The fact that officers on the ship would believe that too was mostly a side-effect, Seivarden thought, or Breq would have gone through the performance sometimes when no visitors were present.

But if Breq wanted an imaginary liaison, why Seivarden? Why not Ekalu or Tisarwat, who was certainly younger and more attractive? Why did Breq want the planet to believe a scion of an ancient, powerful (though extinct) house was kneeling to her? The answer here was even more disturbing. It made Seivarden into a kind of trophy, and Breq into the kind of person, the kind of officer, who would desire such a trophy, something Seivarden would never have thought of her. 

Seivarden couldn’t eat. All the muscles on her face felt stiff. That face. Her face. Its dark, aristocratic features, the unmistakable marks it bore of the oldest, highest, Radchaai lineage. In her previous life, before the suspension pod, she’d never realized how much she’d counted on it to introduce her, to bring her status, respect, and yes, at times even sex. She had never felt ashamed of doing so, for she was committing no deception; anyone, seeing her face, would know Seivarden. 

Now, it felt like a mask. A mask whose meaning had changed in ways she would never understand. Seivarden clenched her fingers around her fork to keep herself from tugging at the corner of her jawline, from wanting to show everyone at the dinner what lay underneath.

That night, when Breq brought out the tiktik board, she refused.

“I’ve upset you,” said Breq, though Seivarden had to believe that Breq had been aware of her distress, via Ship’s sensors, since the evening after Owaainil’s visit. After ignoring or discounting it those other times, she had now chosen to acknowledge it. For some reason, that made Seivarden even angrier. She hated being someone, something, Breq had to soothe.

“I—“ she started. “I don’t—I want to know why you’re doing this.” It came out petulant as a child.

Breq's impassive face tightened slightly, just the tiniest furrow between her brows. “Do you need to know? Can’t we just say that it’s for the benefit of my mission, and play tiktik together in peace?”

That was, of course, what a good officer would have done. What explanation did she need but her commanding officer’s assurance of benefit? But if Seivarden had ever been such an officer, she was not one now. She heard her own voice go on without her will. “Why won’t you tell me? Do you think I’m too stupid to understand? Isn’t that the way you’ve always treated me?” 

Breq sighed. “No, it’s not that. I suppose I don’t want to explain because it’s not something I’m happy about myself. You’ve never served on a ship in permanent orbit around a station, have you?” Seivarden shook her head. “It’s sometimes the custom, especially at more out-of-the-way places, like Athoek, for powerful persons on the planet to make liaisons with high-ranking officers. As a way of seeking prestige, or preference.”

“Clientage? Between Radchaai and non-Radchaai?”

“A form of that, yes. But not governed by the same rules and legal strictures, and thus less stable, more volatile.”

“And you think the plantations owners here might want such an alliance? With you?”

“Yes, even with me, strange and uncomfortable for them as I am. Or rather, I am trying to forestall any of idea of it crossing their minds.”

“Oh.” Seivarden’s anger dissipated somewhat in the face of her curiosity.

“And so, I have been using you as a sort of protection. I have even, though I’m not proud of it, been using your notoriety. I see now that II should have asked you, explained. I apologize. And I thank you for your service. Has it been causing problems for you with Lieutenant Ekalu?”

“Ekalu? No.” Ekalu was the farthest thing from Seivarden’s mind. How could she explain that what had hurt her most was not being asked to play a role in a charade she did not understand, but the fact that the charade could not become reality. But she put those desires forcibly aside. It was enough, for now, to know she had worked to the benefit of the Fleet Captain’s mission. “It is I who should apologize. For speaking out of turn.”

The Fleet Captain shook her head. “We’ll say no more it. Shall we play tiktik now?”

Seivarden was happy to play the wretched game. As they played, however, Seivarden marveled again at the Fleet Captain’s composure, her ability to see and plan. “How can it be,” she asked, “that you, who’ve worn so many faces, should remain always the same, while I, who’ve had the same face for a thousand years, have changed so much that I am unrecognizable to myself?”

“Is that what you think?” Breq asked. “That I’ve never changed?” The question seemed to trouble her more than Seivarden had intended. She retreated into herself, as she did when she went over data from Ship, though to an even greater degree, as if she were reviewing some vast archive available only to herself. Then she was back. “No. I don’t think that can be true. Every day, this world, my own role in it, are new. I hope, I try, to predict how I will act. But sometimes, I cannot.”

Breq’s face never held much expression, but looking at it now, more carefully than she usually allowed herself to do, Seivarden was reminded of the only time she’d seen it discomposed by anything other than extreme physical pain. It had been when she’d brought the _Mercy of Kalr_ to the hole blown out of Athoek station. Then, at the moment of rescue, she’s seen something like wonderment fill Breq’s face. She saw a ghost of that now.

She thought of her old dream, of finding nothing but the void of space under her skin. When she’d learned that the person she knew as Breq had once been the _Justice of Toren_ , she decided the dream had stopped because she’d found an anchor, a being whose steadiness, and strength of purpose had transcended the vagaries of history. Now, she wondered whether it had been something else, the solace of a companion with whom to weather the mutability of time and space.


End file.
